Famous Britons Visit America

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 862, 4 January 1930, Page 11

Famous Britons Visit America

RIDICULE AND BITTERNESS NEW YORK ENTERTAINS ROYALTY There has hardly been a British visitor who has not left his mark on popular feeling on both sides of the Atlantic (writes a special correspondent in the “New York Times,” in an article concerning the visit of Ramsay MacDonald to the United States). Again and again the smile of a visiting prince, the ridicule of a feted author, has transcended tariff and boundary disputes, naval and commercial rivalries and accords. For 60-odd years after the Declaration of Independence, no visiting Britisher —and, indeed, almost no foreigner save Bafayette—had an ovation in America. For that matter, so far as the British went, there was nobody of note to welcome. As for the neglect of America for so many years by British notables, and the harsh criticisms of the undistinguished folk wlio came, the whole matter has long since passed out of memory. But at one time it flared up almost® to the point of international controversy. The highly coloured America pictured by visiting Britons was, according to Mrs. Trollope, for example, one where men were wont to sit indoors with their hats on their heads and their feet on the table. Literature, education, and culture, they prophesied, would be lacking for another century. But the scorn of the more distinguished Briton for our company and our culture continued. Charles Dickens, the popular author of Pickwick Papers, blazed the golden trail to America for his literary successors. He came, a slight, dapper figure, rather over-adorned with “rings and things.” Yet, if Queen Victoria had arrived on a visit of state, America could scarcely have been more flattered and excited. To the “Boz” hall in New York, arranged by an imposing committee headed by the Mayor, tickets were sold as high as 40 dollars apiece. The Park Theatre, stage and pit, was floored over, and the walls hung with Pickwickian scenes. On a specially built stage, tableaux from the novels of the guest of honour were given at intervals between the cotillions and waltzes.

When Anally he entered, with his “little, fat English-looking wife” upon his arm, the whole company formed a lane for tlielr triumphal march across the hall.

A few days later was the “Boz” dinner, with Washington Irving, a flurried toastmaster, in the chair to greet “the literary guest of the nation.” In the unprecedented excitement of this occasion women so far forgot their feminine reserve as to press into the banquet hall to hear the speeches. And now America breathlessly awaited the guest’s rejoinder —his literary bread-and-butter letter. Five months later it came in the shape of his American. Notes. Within nineteen hours of the book’s arrival it had been reprinted, and 50,000 copies were sold in New York in the next two days, while the first shipment to Philadelphia, of 3,000 was snapped up inside of half an hour. The Blow is Landed But the worst forebodings were realised. The hero, like the nobodies who had preceded him, had bitten the hand that had fed him. Our manners, our Press, our sharp practices, our lack of humour and of sanitation all came in for his ridicule. Next year, in Martin Chuzzlewit, he even lampooned his reception in New York. And the feeling between England and America, which had been assuaged in the enthusiasm of his arrival, was more bitter than before. Twenty-five years later, gouty and ill, Dickens made his apology. Other Noted Britons Resentment over remarks, a quarter century old, however, could hardly exist in a eoutnry now long since accustomed to famous British visitors. There had been Lord Morpeth, for instance, and Lord Ashburton, the financier and treaty negotiator. In his honour was the famous dinner at the Astor House, where the whole company rose enthusiastically to toast the Queen; but all save the British guests, for political spite, remained silent and seated when President Tyler’s name was proposed. Thackeray, too, had made two modest lecture tours here in the 1850’s, relatively undined and uninterviewed, jogging about in accommodation trains and carrying his own portmanteau. But the reception beside which all others before and after pale was that given to the Prince of Wales when he came to New York, a romantic, boyish figure, 69 years ago. It was England’s supreme gesture, and before it, according to contemporary account, American prejudices against her were transformed into delighted interest. When the Prince stepped from the Canadian. ferry at Detroit 30,000 people rushed to see him, toppling one of his suite into the river. Along fiag-draped, tree-shaded Broadway in the New York parade the whole city turned out to greet him, side-whis-kered men smartly applauding and the women, bonneted and shawled, in their balconies clasping their hands in delight. He planted the English oak and the American elm still standing on the middle drive in Central Park, and he even went around Manhattan Island in a sight-seeing boat. In the evening as a climax he was whirled to “the greatest ball ever held in the city of New York.” Three thousand people in all the diamonds they could muster were there. Bewhiskered men, and women with their hoopskirted gowns bounced through the polka and the gallop. But when the Prince himself arrived decorum suddenly vanished and a rush was made for him worthy of the flappers of 1929. In the stampede a huge flower vase tottered and fell, splashing the Prince with water. The floor bent, creaked and crashed in, catapulting two unfortunates to the stage below. America’s first attempt at entertaining royalty had more or less fallen through. “We must all,” averred “Harpers’ Weekly,” “bravely call it a failure.” But the guest, nothing shaken,

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1 stayed and danced with his charming ’ American partners till 4.30 a.m. Royalty was not perhaps fittingly honoured, but what was perhaps far more I satisfactory, youth at least was served. ! Next night as a crowning celebraI tion 5,000 volunteer .firemen of New York gave a torchlight parade by the Prince's Fifth Avenue Hotel. Ten years later on the arrival of his younger brother a second alarm was sent in for the New' York Fire Department to welcome him with a ball. In the years that followed dukes and duchesses also became a common sight on the sidew'alks of now blase New York. Particularly, to be sure, dukes—in search of American duchesses. Real English authors, too, began to arrive in such numbers as almost to interfere w-ith one another’s lecture dates. Oscar Wilde, with his flowing locks and knee breeches, and with pearls and diamonds gleaming on a pique shirt front, discoursed before New York society, and, by way of contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson arrived In the steerage and crossed the continent with an emigrant train. The once popular Wilkie Collins came as a "professional reader.” Young Rudyard Kipling vainly looked here for a publisher and cast asperi sions on the United States afterward in “From Sea to Sea.” Matthew Arnold visited us, and later his niece, the novelist, Mrs. Humphry Ward. . Gilbert Murray, the classicist, came, . and Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells —indeed, practically every well- '■ know'll British writer of recent years ’ except the unattainable Bernard . Shaw.

When the present Prince of Wales, for ’tnst.ance, duplicated his grandfather’s visit of almost sixty years before, he was treated far less in his royal than in his personal character —as an active young man who might really like to enjoy part of his stay in a carefree way. Twice he was taken to play at the Racquet and Tennis Club. He was entertained at the Horse Show, the opera, the Hippodrome, the movies and the Follies, and he had a private dance given for him instead of a public ball. Later, just after his Premiership, Lloyd George came to receive, according to newspaper accounts, the greatest reception thus far accorded a foreigner. Women visitors who have also had American welcomes in recent years include Lady Asquith, Lady Astor and Margaret Bondfield, fresh from the English political arena. Lady Astor feted at a dinner by the League of Women Voters, was proudly held up to our supposedly more progressive country as an example of the British woman’s superior political prowess. MacDonald’s Former Visit Moreover, two years ago Ramsay MacDonald himself was here, calling on the President, but also, as befitted a former Labour Premier, dining at a settlement house and again with union officials. On his departure he was seen off, it is said, by a mob of two social workers.